The tool itself is really straight forward to use and start creating with but there’s a few things you can do to help make the best possible flixels, so I thought I’d throw a quick post together and share what I’ve learned in playing with the app for a little while now. Feel free to share your tips in the comments too!

1. Choose the Right Setting / Scene

I find there’s two types of settings/images that work really well as flixels:

a. Isolated Motion - The real magic of Flixels is when there’s a dynamic scene where the bulk of the image is static but a single element stands out from the rest (ie a beach scene where all the people are still but the waves are always lapping at the sand – a race track where the cars are static but the crowd is animated clapping or a busy intersection but only the traffic lights move, etc.)

b. Endless Loops – The other, more straight forward and accessible kind are those shots that simply capture a scene that can be looped endlessly. It doesn’t matter so much that the movement is isolated and contrasted with static elements in the image, just that the animation itself is visually interesting.

2. Make sure you’re steady!

Motion of the whole frame basically ruins any hope of getting a decent looking Flixel and iPhones are almost impossible to hold steady. (feature request: stabilization!)

I try to brace my phone against a stable object when I’m shooting if at all possible (wall, post, newspaper box, the floor, etc.) to keep the framing itself as stable as possible.

That said there are a couple of cheats/tricks you can use:

a. Simple backgrounds

Avoid having other objects/patterns behind the thing you want to animate. the fewer ‘landmarks’ behind the animation the more likely any subtle jitters will be.  For example, no one will notice if part of a plain white wall shifts behind the subject but if it’s a tiled wall and the lines get disjointed and broken during the loop it’ll be very obvious. And whatever you do – don’t have something else moving in the background of the item you want to animate. If you’re not careful, you could get that perfect seamless loop captured but then there’s some other thing moving in the background that ruins.

b. Hide the motion

The other trick is to frame your image so there’s elements that can serve as a buffer to “absorb the motion”. For example, in the Flixel at right I used the black frame of the window as a solid object to absorb the motion. If nothing else in the area is moving you could also expand the animated area out to something that has fewer features/landmarks or makes a natural barrier to hid the motion at. (cloudless blue skies are great for this)

3. Capture and tweak your image to create SEAMLESS looping

This is by far the most challenging part of capturing great Flixels but for them to truly work they need to be seamless. The app itself gives you a few easy tools to help teak your capture and smooth things out but unless you take the loop into consideration before you shoot, it won’t fix everything.

a. Passing through the frame

If something you intend to keep animated is moving across or up or down the frame make sure it enters and leaves the frame within the short capture time. If it doesn’t, your options for creating a seamless loop become very limited (see b. below) as they/it will change size or position significantly and cause a noticeable jump when then loop resets. Generally the best results are loops where the object stays in one spot and the object moving returns back to the same spot (or appears to move back to the same spot) at the end of the cycle.

b. Using the Forward-Reverse Loop

Your only way out of the challenge above is the forward-reverse loop (access through the “looping” tab). Basically this feature changes the loop from the default, which goes from Point A (Start) to Point B (End) and then jumps back to Point A again into a loop that instead reverses itself when it hits Point B and runs the animation backwards to return to Point A.

This can be used to great effect, but be aware of how the animation will look in reverse. In the swing example it’s a motion that is naturally perfect for this style of loop but if there’s a person with long hair on that swing it’ll look pretty strange when it’s blowing backwards away from them when the animation runs backwards to return them to Point A – you can see a similar issue in my Flixel at right but I felt at the end of the day, it didn’t ruin the shot.

c. Set Your Start & End Points Deliberately

This is the mistake I see most often and usually in Flixels that, for want of another minute of tweaking where the animation starts & ends, would have been perfect. It’s dead easy in Flixel to tweak these points through the “Start/End” tab and they make all the difference in how an animation loops.

The best example for these is the subway/endless train shots. Use the start/end frames to ensure the gap between the cars lines up between Point A and Point B. I can’t count how many great shots I’ve seen of an endless subway or train going by, only to have the doors or gap between the cars jump half a car length when the loop resets. You don’t have to use all the frames, if something is moving fast enough you may only need 3 or 4! I try to make frame B be just slightly behind frame A so there isn’t a slight pause/stop in the animation as it rolls through.

Also be aware with the reversing loop style – objects have natural motions, use the start & end frames to ensure that you make the transition from forward to reverse (and reverse to forward) as natural as possible. one single frame can make a huge difference. Flick back and forth between “Starting Frame” and “Ending Frame” to get a sense of how they line up/compare.

In Summary

So there you have it remember to choose the right setting, keep your camera steady and capture & tweak your image to create a seamless loop – you’ll be on your way to creating a well-loved (& probably featured) Flixel in no time!

(I’m ryancoleman on the Flixel service by the way – look me up & let me know if you get some great results, I’d love to see them!)

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3. Which way do you your roll your content?

So, with that in mind I’ve started to make some changes and tweaks to try and focus the different streams of content so those who choose to consume content I produce (thanks, by the way) can get the type of content they’re interested in, and hopefully none (or at least as little as possible) of the stuff they don’t.

New Portfolio Site

The biggest change so far is that I’ve started to migrate all work/portfolio related content into a new site at http://work.ryancoleman.ca - since I’m working full-time the showcase worthy freelance work & speaking engagements are a little more spread out, causing them to easily get lost  in the sea of other posts and content on this site. I’m also trying to keep my actual “blog” a lot lighter in terms of moving parts and that ran counter to having slicker, portfolio style posts.

Everything Else

So what to follow / where to read?

Fire Hose
My primary twitter account @ryancoleman continues to be my fire hose stream – pretty much everything ends up there eventually.
Ideas / Opinion / Blog
That’s this site, http://ryancoleman.ca

Work, Speaking & Facilitation Portfolio
That would be the new site mentioned above http://work.ryancoleman.ca

Photography [Photoblog | @ryansphotos | Tumblr ]
I’m not sure I’ve found the right mix here yet but in a nutshell:

- if RSS is your preferred method the Photoblog is your best bet
- @ryansphotos is the same content as the photoblog, just via twitter (my @ryancoleman account also includes these posts)
- My Tumblr Photoblog integrates the primary photoblog content & my Instagram pics

Humour, Oddstuff, General Interest [Tumblr]
I’ve got an odd sense of humour – I try to keep that side of me confined to my primary Tumblr blog.

So there you have it, if you got this far thanks for reading – hopefully this helps you narrow the stream of content coming from me if the fire hose is just too much.

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1. Which way do you your roll your content?
2. Major site content revisions – when do you translate?
3. Photos by Photojunkie

Example of Brushes & Colours available in Paper

Like John, I’m a long time Sketchbook Pro fan and had been using it for sometime. While it was great on my desktop I never quite got in the groove with it when I started trying their Sketchbook Express on the iPad. With Paper though, I immediately connected with it and just loved the quality of the default brush. Drawing features are kept to a bare minimum (brush selection, fixed palette, draw & erase & undo – aka ‘rewind’.) & changing/adding pages is simple and straight forward.

Nice Touches

A couple of things I really like:

1. Multiple ‘Sketchbooks’
   Paper lets you create multiple “Books” in the app, so I can section off my personal stuff form my work stuff really easily – or if I’m working on a specific project I can give it its own book etc.
2. Rewind
   Their interpretation of “undo” is great. Rather than simply undoing and removing the entire last action you made you can simple ‘rewind’ by placing two fingers on the screen & then moving them counter clock-wise. And it backs up your actions, just as rewind implies. Go too far? Just rotate your fingers clockwise. I found it a little finicky at first but after a bit of use it’s become pretty natural.

One Feature Request/Wish

While I appreciate the minimalism there’s one feature I’d love to see added and that’s very, very basic layers. I don’t eed full blown layers like Photoshop or Sketchbook but even just having two layers would be great. I’ve encountered a few times where it’d be great to be able to sketch something out on one layer, then ink & colour over it on a second and finally remove or hide the sketch layer when finished. I know it breaks the paper metaphor, but still…

Highly recommend it – Paper is available in the Apple App Store for iPads.

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3. VizThink Wrapup: The Conference in General

As we were using a special Virtual CLassroom app, and I had to make my 90minute presentation fit into 45 minutes, I had to do some redesign to my deck so I made a clean start and rebuilt it almost from scratch. (I was never super thrilled with how the first deck turned out either) – Working with this content has been an interesting experience as I’ve now packaged it as a 90 minute talk, a 45 minute talk and a 5 minute Ignite – it’s actually been really good practice for developing story and learning where/what to cut. 

Here’s the deck I delivered:

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I’m excited to announce I’ll be speaking/facilitating at the upcoming Visual Thinking and Literacy Conference in Michigan on March 17, 2012.

The 2012 Visual Thinking Conference is for anyone focused on visual approaches to thinking and communication. So whether you are a business leader giving presentations, a marketing manager designing websites and materials, or a grade school teacher looking for new ways to reach students, no other event offers you more of today’s solutions… and tomorrow’s vision.

While I’m still working out the final details of my session the basic gist will be around practically demonstrating some core visual facilitation activities (or ‘games’ for the gamestorming crowd ;) ) and showing how they can serve as building blocks in a workshop or meeting.

It’ll be great to catchup with friends like Cliff Atkinson, Jamie Nast, Karl Gude, Tom Crawford and Noah Iliinski (full list of facilitators) and be in the room with a whole lot of people passionate and interested in visual thinking again.

If you’re itching to get out to another Visual Thinking oriented event, this day long conference is an absolute steal @ $100/person (great discounts for K-12 teachers & students) so be sure to check it out & you can register here.

Related posts:

1. Upcoming: KDMI Visual Thinking Series at UofT
2. Visual Thinking & The Writing Process
3. VizThink Wrap-up: Building Visual Thinking Communities

Over these past couple of weeks we haven’t missed cable at all. Sure the kids have missed having something like Teletoon or Treehouse always there as an option but the truth is, they don’t watch a lot of TV and when they do it’s usually at times when at least a few channels have some sort of kid programming on. In fact, I’d argue we’ve been enjoying the programs we do watch live a lot more because the picture quality is far superior to the compressed feeds you get through a cable broadcaster. We made the switch over Superbowl weekend so we were even able to watch the “real” commercials on our NBC channel without having a Canadian broadcaster air their coverage over it.

We get roughly 20 channels in HD, including a handful that we couldn’t receive on Cable; for example, who would have thought that I’d have to get rid of cable to get a 24 hour music video station? (CoolTV)

Research, Research, Research.

My advice to anyone thinking about making the jump to an OTA solution is to read up and get a gameplan together. The technology isn’t complex but you really do need to get a sense of how the gear works, and what the right tools for the ‘job’ are. If you’re a fellow Canadian, don’t waste anytime Googling – just head straight to Digitalhome.ca, specifically, their OTA forum. Hands down this forum consistently had the best information & it seems like a really supportive community. Their reception results threads will help you get a good handle on what channels you should be able to get & what kind of gear you’ll need to get them. Indeed, it was these forums that convinced me to keep going after my initial experiments.

Be Ready to Experiment – take it one step at a time

While we’re not talking about huge sums of money, the bits and pieces can add up – my final tally for gear & materials was ~$300 but I got to that total over the course of a few steps of investigation. After reading the forums and seeing what folks in my area were using I decided to go with a CM4221HD antenna.  Part of the reason I chose this particular model was I knew I had to mount my antenna in the attic (we live in a condo townhome & can’t mount antenna’s high on exterior walls etc.) and as a result I had a finite sized opening that the antenna needed to fit through.

Step One – Can I Get Anything?

I initially bought the antenna, mounted it on a broomstick in a Christmas tree stand in the family room and got a basic feel for what channels I’d be able to receive.  While initial results were okay I was missing a couple of key channels (CTV, NBC, FOX) but after reading up some more it was clear that once properly mounted I’d likely fill in those blanks. At this stage I was fairly sure an amp was also going to be my saviour so I added a CM7777 preamp to the mix and CTV immediately joined the channel line-up.

Step Two – Is my cabling good enough?

Something to be aware of is that not all cabling is created equally (RG-59 is a little more lossy than the preferred RG-6). My son’s room has an unused cable jack in it that I planned to tie into once I mounted the antenna in the attic from there that cable runs down into the basement where it joins up with the cable splitters. My concern, of course, was that over the run of cable down two floors then back up a floor and a half to our TV (plus a long run in the family room itself from wall to TV) that I’d start losing signal quality & thus channels. So before mounting it in the attic I moved the patchwork broomstick contraption up to the upstairs room, plugged it in and went downstairs to see what I could receive. NBC joined the ranks but it was still a little touch and go. The good news was though, that all of the other channels remained BUT I had to pivot the antenna to get all of them – the CN Tower & Buffalo are unfortunately ~50-70 degrees separated for me so I was getting concerned about maybe having to add a second antenna in (which complicates everything). I decided though to take a flyer and install just the one antenna in the attic & see how things went.

Step Three – Install

My attic is blown insulation, so I was really, really hoping I didn’t have to go crawling around in it. As luck would have it there was the perfect vertical post in the rafters right next to the attic opening. First things first, I had to make sure I could run the cable. Thankfully the jack in one son’s room shares a wall with the closet of my other son’s room so I could just drill into the closet, run the wire up the back corner of the closet and through the ceiling, cheating it closer to the attic opening. I then just made sure to aim the cables natural curve to roughly the direction of the opening. Sure enough the cable ended up pretty close and a little nudge with a brook stick was enough to get a hand on it. I managed to do the whole install from the opening on top of a ladder.

Then it was time to mount the antenna and amp in the attic – the “professional” way would probably be to use a J-mount – a $60 mount that’s basically a short stump of vertical pipe attached to a mounting plate. But that’s not the “maker” way, so instead I improved with 2, $2 1″ 90deg PVC elbows (pictured above center). That hole in the side was my addition to help counteract the one challenge of using these elbows. Basically the mounting hardware was just two half-circle brackets that you’d place over the pipe and screw into the wood behind. The challenge was the weight of the antenna would cause the elbow to pivot/rotate. So what I did was put the first bracket on. Got the elbow level and then drove a screw threw the wall of the elbow opposite the hole and into the post, to tack it into place. Then put the second bracket on (above right)

Then I mounted the antenna and added a second elbow to mount the mast half of the CM7777 pre-amp I mentioned earlier. You can see the finished mounting below on the left.

Next it was time to trim the cable back at the jack I was going to tie into and mount the pre-amp power supply – because the jacks were behind my son’s dresser, and you’re supposed to keep the power supply as close to the antenna as possible I just went with a simple wall mount for the amp. Last but not least, the conversion was completed by plugging this line into the source on the primary splitter in the basement.

And that was it – to celebrate FOX finally decided to come in and join the OTA party as well. A little tweaking via walkie talkie between my son and I and we actually managed to get the antenna dialed in so we only need one to get almost all our channels. Our only sacrifice was OMNI2 but I honestly can’t tell you the last time I watched that station.

Step Four – Enjoy

So like I said, we’re getting a whole whack of channels including: CBC English, CBC French, CTV, Global, CHCH, CITS, City, Omni1, NBC (+WGRZ2), CBS, ABC, FOX, PBS (+PBS3), MyTV, The Country Network and The Cool TV.

Non OTA Sources

In addition to the OTA setup we’ve also got Netflix on all of the TVs in the house and our two primary TVs also have devices (PS3 Family Room, Samsung Blu-ray in the bedroom) that can play back files of our server in the basement. For serving up the media files I use the Serviio DLNA server, which I highly recommend. It’ll play almost anything and has a built in transcoder, so even if your device can’t play the native file format it will transcode the file into something the device will understand on the fly. It’ll also take live streams and pipe those to your TV and some members of the Serviio forum kindly maintain and update a list of available streams that automatically update when they show on your TV.

Savings

Cutting cable cuts about $60/month from our bill – with Netflix and one other subscription we add back ~$13 for a net savings of $47. Depending on how the next few months go, I may need to up our Internet connection to get us to the next bandwidth cap tier – we’ve got 80GB bit it’s tight. For another $10/month we double our connection speed and more than double our bandwidth cap. All-in-all we should be break even in 6-9 months which is more than reasonable.

Have you cut the cable? Got questions? Let me know in the comments below!

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But We Know What We Know!

I think a major reason for this is people tend to assume that they already know what’s happened, or what the strategy is or what their motivations are but the truth is, unless you have a clear, concise and CONSISTENT way of expressing those positions or goals you, and the people you work with, will never be as effective at delivering on your vision.

Often the difference between just ‘barely making it’ and ‘nailing it’ lies in the details and a nuanced understanding of what it is you’re trying to achieve.

Question Everything

Bringing together your plan, and developing your vision, is like an investigation – you need to uncover and document the facts and then understand how they relate to each other. And what do investigators do? They ask question, lots of them.

The truth is, every vision, strategy or work-plan is rooted in questions:

“Where/What do we want our company to be in the future?”

“What results do we want to see in 5 years?”

“How are we going to get this done?”

But if you stop and think about these questions, you’ll quickly realize that all these questions really do is bring more questions to mind.

“Where/What do we want our company to be in the future?” - “Well, what is important to us?” – What’s important to our customers?” … … …

Questions Structure & Guide Your Thinking

Coming up with the questions you need to answer is the fastest route to coming up with a plan of attack – the art is in understanding what order you need to answer the questions. Obviously, you can answer any question any time but you may not be coming to the best conclusion if you haven’t answered the right questions before hand you need to be  deliberate in how you approach your questions .

As you start to document the questions you need answered and get them in the right order, your plan of attack will emerge quite clearly – start at the first thing you know and work down!

Why? What? How?

Next time you need to structure your thinking, try this approach:

1. Take a sheet of paper (or a whiteboard/flipchart) – split it into thirds and write “Why?”, “What?”, and “How?” in the three boxes from top to bottom.
2. The “What?” should be the easy one – this is what you’re trying to accomplish, define or understand. Write your question down in the middle of that section. (i.e. “What is our Vision For 2020″)
3. Now focus on the “Why?” section. These are questions of understanding and reflection. Ask yourself “What do I need to know in order to competently answer my question. Write them on post-it notes so they can easily be rearranged.Working in a group? Take a minute and brainstorm individually, tell people to be as granular and specific as possible when posing their questions. When they’re done, post up the post-its and cluster them based on the underlying root question behind them.  Rewrite those root questions on a new post-it and use it going forward. Be sure to save the specific questions though – they’ll likely come in handy when you start to answer the question.
4. Looking at your Why? questions ask yourself, what do I need to understand before I can go any further? These questions will typically be your root motivations, or the motivations of people you play a key role in whatever you’re developing. Put that question at the top of the page. If there’s things that can be answered in parallel that’s okay, put them side-by-side. Continue through your questions until they’re all in order – being aware of how answering the questions helps build on your thinking.
5. Now move to the “How?” – How questions are questions of process and doing. Repeat the same process you did with the “Why’s?” Only this time ask yourself all the questions you need to answer in order to actually deliver on your “What?” – the reality of the How section is you will ask all kinds of questions “Who needs to be involved?”, “Where do we stand today?” You’re planning for a trip from A to Z – there’s lots of questions to be answered!
6. Once you’ve got your questions in order, step back and read them aloud – do they flow right? If you answered those questions in that order does the story they tell make sense? If so, congratulations – you’ve now got a great framework of investigation to work (& plan) from!

If you give this a go – I’d love to hear how you make out… let me know in the comments below!

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(The whole thing is interesting but skip to ~3:50 to see the specific use case I’m talking about)

Photosynth worked on a pretty basic premise; take a handful of wide establishing shots, then take lots of pictures from other angles and the software could then stitch them together and relate them to one another – resulting in what you see in the video above.

One thing I’ve been amazed by though, is that no one has taken this technology & run with it for Live Events. Everyone knows that familiar sparkle that any video of a live event has, as many of the spectators take photos. Today many of those pictures now end up online almost immediately.

TV as the establishing shot: Fill in with Social Media

The wide establishing shots to help give Photosynth the ‘bones’ to relate all the photos to each other would be no problem with the HD television cameras that are present at the events. Pulling pictures in in real-time could be easily handled through a dedicated hashtag (or monitoring a variety of tags).

Timeline is what makes it amazing

Where it gets even more interesting though is when you consider all of the photos would be timestamped and with good accuracy because mobile phones nowadays generally sync to their network time automatically. Add a timeline feature to Photosynth and suddenly the way you can replay or review the action changes entirely.

That great hit? That amazing moment that set of a thousand flashes? When that rock star appeared on stage? These photos can all be related to each other and suddenly you don’t just have just the TV cameras view of the action but tens, hundreds or even thousands of perspectives of that moment.

The tech is all there, I’m sure with a little tweaking it wouldn’t take much to get it going… Just throwing it out there… :)

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3. [IDEA] Mind State Messaging

Ideas are living things, they start off small but cared for, and helped to develop, they can begin to take on a life of their own but to really be transformational your idea will likely need a little TLC before you even think about executing in it. That said, where ideas really need the TLC is before you even have them.

Nature vs. Nurture

Some ideas are born great, others need some help and hate to break it to you, most ideas fall in the latter category. It’s rare to have that ‘a-ha’ moment in a spontaneous fashion. Your ideas need time to grow. Think of the idea as a seed, often the idea gets planted and as soon as we see any green poking out of the ground we’re harvesting it (Get it done!) but have you really thought everything through? How often have you seen a team run with an idea only to hit a major roadblock that wasn’t anticipated? Have you even had the best idea yet?

Growing the Idea

That first idea might seem great, but it’s definitely not your best thinking. Think of popcorn. The kernel is that first idea and many get so excited they even have an idea they just run with it – but someone, way back in history looked at that kernel and said ‘not good enough’ and then began experimenting with it. They mixed it with other ingredients, and eventually came across the magical combination of heat, oil & vigorous shaking that turned that useless kernel into popcorn.

We should put all of our ideas through the same process, we need to try to break them, distort them, shake them and find that ‘magic’ combination that unlocks the true idea that they contain. And then let them rest before moving on.

Creating an Environment for Great Ideas

Let’s step back though, way back to before you even had the idea. Ideas are spontaneous, you never know when they might hit, as a result you can’t schedule a 30 minute meeting to have that ideals as we often do in a business setting. Once in a while you get lucky- but more often we end up grabbing the first idea that passes through the room and run with it.

Ideation is an Athletic Activity
Profession athletes aren’t chosen at random from the stands like contestants on ‘The Price is Right’. They put years of work into perfecting their craft so when they hit the playing field they’re primed to make the kinds of magical plays that separate them from the rest of us. And they don’t come to the field cold either, they stretch, toss a ball around, get their heart pumping to get their body read before the game begins.

This is where we most often fail when it comes to ideation and innovation though. We walk into a room and generally the conversation goes “Here’s our problem, how are we going to fix it?”, people throw some obvious ideas out, others respond with all the reasons x, y & z won’t work, and more often than not we walk away from the meeting promising to ‘check out x, y or z’ (usually to try and confirm why they won’t work.

Just like in sports, having an great idea means putting in the effort to prepare your mind for the task ahead. Your brain fuels itself on information & intersections but you need to get it in the right state to accept those inputs.

To get yourself to that state you need to do the following:

1. Make Time
   As you’ll see, the following suggestions are not something you can just turn on, you need to plan enough time to get warmed up, get your mind focused and also cool down & digest the outputs at the end of the session. 30 minutes is nowhere near enough time – you really need two hours or more, especially if you’re out of practice.
2. Come Prepared
   Before people even set foot in the room they need to prepare themselves. This may mean reading some key articles, understanding the problem better or gathering other knowledge. All too often you get everyone in a room and it’s impossible to move forward because someone doesn’t have the knowledge they need to properly test an idea.I’m just about to do a day long session for a group at work where the preparation actually started back in November with a core group. We worked through a brief session back then to identify all the information they felt they needed to understand in order to tackle the problem properly. They’ve since met several times to share their research and knowledge in order to have everyone on a level playing field at the session.
3. Warm-up
   Every distraction floating around in your head is something that chews up a little of your mental horsepower and distracts your brain from the task at hand.  Turn the Blackberries and iPhones off. Consider doing an icebreaker activity that helps focus people’s energy to the task at hand and puts some distance between the rest of their workday & the session. A great
4. Come with a Plan
   The biggest mistake I see people make is coming to meetings unprepared. Before coming into the room you need a strategy for how you’re going to approach the problem and help the people in the room think it through. If it’s a big enough problem, consider hiring a professional facilitator to come in and help you. At the very least, pick up a copy of Gamestorming as it’s full of techniques and approaches that anyone can bring into a meeting with great effect.
5. Build Up to the Idea
   Again, ideas are spontaneous and arrive on their own time, all you can do is create an environment that encourages them and prepare you and your coworkers brains to catch them.The best way I’ve found to do this is to approach the idea from a few different angles before tackling it head on. Figure out the characteristics and inputs that will affect this idea and focus on activities that help everyone in the room think about and understand those aspects better.
6. Capture Everything & Make it Visible
   
   As the session progresses capture the thinking on paper & post-its. Create artifacts and be sure to post them around the room. You never know what might get suggested early on that could be the important other half of an idea that gets suggested later.
7. Force deeper thinking
   Every meeting has a ‘slam dunker’, the person who latches on to the first ‘good’ idea because they just want to slam the ball home as quickly as possible. Design your session so you can test the ideas. Shred them, twist them, reverse them, break them and build them back up. You need to give yourself the time to really play with the idea. When everyone starts nodding together it’s time to attack the idea from a different angle.

In Short: Give Your Idea the Time it Needs – Before, During and After

It takes time to do this right, with ideas there’s no quick fix – especially if it’s not something that people on the team are really expected to do on a daily basis. You need to nourish your brain in the days or weeks leading up to a session, giving it the information it needs to tune itself to the kinds of ideas you need. At the session you need to warm your brain back up and help it get focused on the task at hand. Finally, afterwards you need to give your brain the time to punt the idea around in your subconscious and think it through some more.

There’s a reason people say they need to sleep on something. It gives the idea room to breathe and let’s you step back and reflect on it. Does it excite you still the next day? What ‘what-ifs’ did you think of over night that you missed while you cooked up the idea? A little distance is a great thing for an idea as you nudge it out of the nest and see if it can fly.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Like any athletic activity, the more often you do it, the better you’ll get at it but it takes time & practice. Aside from a $20 copy of Gamestorming, every idea in this post is FREE. It just takes a little extra time to implement and do properly. And while scheduling a longer meeting (2,4, even 8 hours) may initially get push back, once people have seen how effective a little extra time can be they’ll get on board pretty quickly. The reality is, they already spend this time on a problem – just ineffectively and in fits and starts across multiple meetings.

Good luck & happy ideating!

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1. Sketchcasting – a great tool for VizThinkers
2. Recommended Reading for August 26th
3. VizThink3 Recap – VizThink4 Announced & some ideas for VizThink5…

These two bills arguably present the first front in a battle to keep the Internet open, free and uncensored. They threaten to hand the reigns of the web to multinational corporations, entertainment companies primarily, allowing them to have sites they don’t like blocked within the US and gives them the power to sue sites just for LINKING to other sites that may host or otherwise give access to copyrighted materials. The laws are vague, over reaching and variations of it will no doubt spread to Canada in short order if passed in the United States.

Get Informed 

Michael Geist has a great article on Huffington Post about why we should care here in Canada.

Fight for the Future published this great video that explaining why Protect-IP is a dangerous bill:

You can also check out the infographic put together by AmericanCensorship.org. Wikipedia also has a good page outlining some of the challenges with these bills.

Make Your Voice Heard

Visit Sopastrike.com to see how you can make your voice heard.

If you’re outside of the US use this form to add your name to the petition:

#stopsopa

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